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MIG Welding Aluminum Without a Spool Gun (Video)

06-15-2013, 01:55 PM

Goodafternoon, everyone!

Hope y'all are having a nice weekend. Heres a recent video of mine... It was highly requested, and although I'd never attempted welding aluminum with anything but a TIG machine or a massive 500 amp push-pull gun, I decided to wing it and hope for the best.

What did I find? Contamination. A LOT of contamination... The wire was clean and the metal was clean, so, best I can figure thats coming from the drive rolls (steel, with grease/crap, and steel on them), and the STEEL liner in the gun.

But aside from that, it worked... great! I had some problems but it was still far more successful than stick welding aluminum, atleast when I tried that a while back. I loosened the tension (greatly) and only had feeding issues when the wire burned back and I pusled the trigger hoping to pop it loose (DONT do that, :blush: ). I also noticed that this wire has a tendancy to burn back when you stop the weld, so I yank the gun back to increase the Contact-Tip-To-Work-Distance, thus preventing the wire from "sticking".

It was fun. And although it should be obvious, I'll say it anyway. This isnt ment to be a how-to. I just wondered how this would work, and went for it. It was really fun :cool2: